Beware of political führerism

The Catalan electoral campaign, which recently began, shows a number of shortcomings in terms of democracy, which threaten to turn the traditionally liberal Catalan region into a territory of monolithic, exclusive affirmations. In consonance with the present Catalan premier's pretension of making the election a plebiscite on Catalan independence, in which the nation's destiny will be tied to his own political future, it is to be deplored that the electoral campaign exhibits so many obvious symptoms of deficient democratic quality.

Outstanding among these symptoms is the shameless insistence on the pro-independence line on the part of the openly government-run media Catalunya Ràdio and TV-3, which have lost the public and general character of which they once could boast. This is accompanied by the absence of even minimal neutrality in the matter of institutional advertising, which is not given to media that do not toe the line, and by excessive ad hoc subsidies to those that do. Then there is the regional government's exaggeratedly partisan behavior in terms of direct action: the Electoral College has had to shut down some of its messages calling on citizens to come out and vote on the grounds of their partisan and sectarian character. Never as now has the governing Catalan nationalist party so clearly shown its sectarian nature.

All these threats to democratic moderation would be less alarming if the principal party of the regional opposition, the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC), had been keeping watch to ensure the quality of democratic conduct. Or if the party of Spanish right, the Popular Party (PP), were not opposing this secessionism with a centralist deafness to reasonable Catalan grievances.

The buildup to the electoral campaign has been seasoned by too many incidents of farce, from the point of view of the rule of law and of democratic usage. It is unacceptable for an outgoing parliament to mark out the road map for its successor. It is not acceptable for a government, regional or national, to allow its mandate to be dictated by an informal assembly, a demonstration however massive it be, or by entities supposedly of "civil society," previously primed and nourished by subsidies. And it is out of place when the leader of a traditionally moderate and democratic party such as Convergencia i Uniò explicitly or implicitly postulates the use of illegal means to attain its cherished dreams; or trusts the achievement of the same to the possible denial of its European identity.

Never as now have the Catalan citizens found themselves so constrained to an undesirable choice between an improvised secessionism and an asphyxiating neo-centralism which threatens to cramp Catalonia's linguistic particularity, the attributions of its self-government and the duty of according the region a proportional share of state expenditure. The drift of Artur Mas toward a sort of führerism, especially when the opinion surveys are giving him a clear majority in the next Catalan parliament, is a danger to democracy, whether intended for building a state of his own or otherwise — full independence, or the sort of Catalan regionalism we are familiar with.